Chris has personally written over 2,000 articles that have been read more than one billion times-and that's just here at How-To Geek. However, you can re-enable SIP after and your Mac won't mind that you've deleted Chess.app and other built-in system apps.Ĭhris Hoffman is the former Editor-in-Chief of How-To Geek. If you actually did want to remove any of these built-in apps from your Mac, you'd have to disable System Integrity Protection first.
Related: How to Disable System Integrity Protection on a Mac (and Why You Shouldn't) This prevents you from deleting them, and it also ensures malware can't modify these applications and infect them. Be very careful when typing the following command:Īs of Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan, System Integrity Protection protects these applications and other system files from being modified. For example, running the following command in a terminal window would delete the built-in Chess app. On OS X 10.10 Yosemite and earlier, it was possible to open a terminal window and issue commands to delete these system apps, which are located in the /Applications folder. Macs also have no way to uninstall or install operating system features, so there's no way to easily remove the many applications Apple included with your Mac.
